A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

YOUNG

SOMETIMES I SURPRISED MYSELF and went to where my young husband was sitting — and he was often sitting, inky, cross, a writing tablet under his arm — and I went down on my knees. I was between his legs on the night I first met her, the girl of this story; and again when the doorbell rang and rang with our neighbor on the care of the shared garden, I was in his lap.

“Human hair balled in nylons keeps the deer away. Beetles eat the roses, but in this climate everything grows,” our neighbor said.

Molds, I thought of, all kinds of fungus.

Nothing bad had ever happened to me; my father was sending us money, and my young husband and I were grateful. I wrote thank-you notes on heavy cards vined with my initials. I had a new last name and told my young husband, and anyone who asked, that I liked it. I said I had always wanted to be at the end of the alphabet, and this was true, but I was lying when I said I wanted to meet new people. My fantasy was to be crippled enough to be allowed to read in bed all day, yet when I wanted to go to the theater, I could. I bought tickets to a lot of plays and lied about the cost. I lied about money. Sometimes we had less and sometimes more than I reported. But who would have known what cut flowers cost? The tulips were expensive! Common, yes, ordinary, nothing of the wistful about them, nothing poetical, but they were clean and sturdy, and I went on lying about how much flowers cost. I lied about other things, too, sometimes fantastically, even garishly. Any story about where the girl and I went was untruth; I embellished.

Amsterdam for the weekend — not likely!

And what was expected of me?

We were visitors, my young husband and I, and we were ignorant. Should we consider the garden beds our business, too? we wondered. And could we cut the roses, or were we just to mow the grass? Other concerns I had were over dates, rivers, architectural styles; I wanted to know. What was a caryatid, an obelisk, a cataract? I had to look up new words and many of the same words. Pusillanimous was one I could never remember! The girl taught me how to say Magdalen on a day full of histories — this is where and this is where and this is where it happened. Here indeed was an English friend when the brusque wind that was our neighbor smelled of garden. “I am used to,” our neighbor whined on and on, “I am used to.” Water, rake, prune. That garden was all of the time.

Eventually we fought over it, the neighbor and I, but the garden came with the flat as shared. It was shared, yet I was too shy to walk freely in it, and my young husband had other tours in mind.

Alone, arrived at the British Museum, I walked toward the great sooty columns and into the shadowed interior; skirts, I heard, and whisperers scuffling past. Heroines, full of restraint, circled medieval weaponry: Fanny Price and Lucy Snow, commonly known — like the tulips — yet I favored them as heroines. They had integrity, and though I did not, I strove to be better and was inspired by my visits to the manuscript rooms. Seals, documents, signatures — their makers really lived!

I tramped along the Long Water alone, and sometimes my young husband came, too, but what I wanted was a dog. I had some breeds in mind, and we went to kennel shows to see them. We pretended we were buying, or I pretended, and my young husband indulged me. He let me stay to see the setters show off in the ring. He let me coo and calculate the cost. Much too much money!

This is the woman I was then, spoiled, fearful, idolatrous, a mix that our neighbor, I think, recognized. A big box in a car coat, our neighbor stood at the gate to the garden, and I stood at the window looking down at her. We looked at each other for what felt like a long time, unsmiling and curious, seeming to ask, What is it like where you live?

I missed home and I didn’t miss home. I said I could live here forever just to be surrounded by the scribbling ghosts. My young husband was scribbling something. Situated, alert, he quoted E. P. Thompson from The Making of the English Working Class. I quoted some writers, too, a bit more obvious, yes, but love poems: “Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day, Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?” We took ourselves seriously. We were foolish, but we believed — or I did — that in another country we might take up our work; here, in a place where every third house had its plaque, its honored dead, we might see what we were meant to do, and we might know to do it.

It was all this not knowing. What are you going to do and what are you going to do? At least here were no nearby parents to ask, “What happens now?” We were living far away in a watery country; brush past the shrubbery and it spilled. I loved it, England, yes. Mostly I wanted to be here and not home. The rock walls greened in the fissures, and the terraces were overgrown — woodbine, musk rose, eglantine. Shakespeare’s benevolent spirit. Keats once, alone along Well Walk; but the dead in the galleries were women who had suffered in love — as who had not? — only these women were famous for it. Say anything, teach anything, prove anything, monsieur; I can listen now.

I did not always want to listen to my young husband speak. His voice, I thought, was flat and had no music — and neither did mine, which was reason enough to be quiet. On buses, in taxis, I often put my finger to my lips. After the theater, with the accents in our ears, it was best to be quiet.

The rain made us quiet and kept us indoors with books, and I was happy. I liked reading, and I still liked bringing my young husband off in the fogged winter light. It seemed then that our bodies were English pale and that the rain against the window made rivulets of shadow — did it? Was the night sky I saw quite so pink?

I wasn’t sure.

I wasn’t sure of a lot of things after they had happened.

A new morning, January, Magdalen, the deer park, I was without my young husband and in the girl’s company. The frozen grass was still green, very hard underfoot. My shoes were flimsy and wet, while the girl, I saw, was wearing boots — Wellingtons, of course, why not?

Or else she wore high heels with leather pants.

Other sounds, sighing.

Her everyday shoes swiped like rags against the floor; her lips stuck when she licked them to talk. I licked them for her — ah!

Too fast.

First came the cashmere sweater with its voluptuous neck, then the tapered houndstooth slacks, the wrist-thin ankles, the narrow foot. These parts of her belonged to a girl from a glamorous home and endless funds to live by. Sidesaddle in the chair, she was wearing rolled against her neck this luscious red sweater. She was fair; she was slight. Oh, she was and she was! The tangles she thumbed off her comb I took up on an impulse that surprised me. The way I had always felt about shed hair in lockets or worked into bracelets and clasped was that shed was dirty.

But I took up strands of her, took up her lipstick, the fringe she wore for underwear. “May I?” I asked and borrowed belts with buckles from another century to be bound up with her, a tartan girl in mist and lamplight, a girl in a winter coat the rain had beaded.

We stayed too long in the bedsit.

The bedsit was hers, a place tunneled to through dank cobbled streets the color of slime. The journey was cold, but the bedsit was very warm. I put my leg near the source and felt burned, yet hours and hours went by in her bedsit, and we were late for what was planned.

My young husband asked, “Is the bedsit her idea of poor?” He also said, “Go! Get out! It will do you good!” So I went to the theater when what he meant for me was join the wives, those Bermondsey mavens after trivets and toast racks, fish knives and forks. “Ivory soaked in milk gets the stains out,” I learned, and I learned about churches. So, so that was the apse, that the transept, the aisle. The wives of young husbands I met had, many of them, taken up stone rubbing. On their knees and in their overcoats, they rubbed as under tents. I thought they looked like lily pads. The floors they knelt on, and I knelt on with them, the floors were pond colored, uneven, cold. Our coats were no protection. The girl had me over to get warm. She stood close; her close breath smelled of tea. Slight breasts, hip bones, lips. Then I was on my knees again, on my stone-rubbing knees, and my knees were sore. The harsh carpet hurt.

I tend to rush.

The night she leaned over to kiss my hand, my hand held out on the table, that time the candles singed my hair, that time we leaned so close was it beekeeping or Quentin Bell — what were we talking about when I said, “Me, too, yes”? I said, “Yes, the same way, me, too,” and later I tried to write it out to her, and what I said was corny but stupidly, stupidly true!

The girl was, was…I was word poor, tongue tied, halfway embarrassed, but why, in the first place, did I write to her? The letter was smeared in the rain when I mailed it — but I mailed it.

“Why did you?” was what my young husband asked, but this was later.

Another time my young husband was with us and sat on the floor of her bedsit in his coat. He had been away.

I believed my young husband. He could have! I believed him when he said he had been in the States staying with his parents, asking for money and more time abroad, giving excuses, showing the notes for a book. I believed he had a book although I had not seen it.

And never, never did I think that he was lying, that he was, as I was, making calls to someone, saying, “I meant to, but I didn’t,” saying, “I’m afraid,” saying, “Where?”

Except that I was young, why did so much of what happened surprise me?

I did not want to be married. That was the feeling I had when I opened the closet door and saw his side of things, which was so much like my side of things, rumpled and slung, that I thought we were unsafe, and I was afraid.

We were too much alone.

We were too much alone with no reason to wake and slept on and on with even the curtains open. Nothing could wake us. We slept on, then stayed up late with weekend visitors, mostly unexpected yet all related. They came with traveler’s checks and maps, saying tricky words aloud because, I think, like me they were proud of knowing how Leicester, Glyndebourne, St. John were pronounced. And the names themselves, the English had such names! Persevering oaks of names, deeply stained copper beaches. I wondered why had I picked his name, my young husband’s last name. What did I hope to do with a name no one could pronounce?

The girl — oh, to be as smart as that! Pouncing lightly on Virginia Woolf the way she did, saying, “The books are all chorus and no plot.” Who cared if the ideas were not always original? The girl was professorial and sure; complex sentences expressed complex thoughts. Pater and Ruskin. Caryatid, I knew she would know it.

Other excitements.

The way she drank leaving some of what she drank on her lips.

“Kiss me.”

“Here?”

“Kiss me!”

The slipknot of laughter was so easily loosed in her.

“Be an adult,” she said, “be false and effusive,” and I was. When my young husband came through the door, I jumped off the bed and kissed him, too. I told him how glad I was to see him back.

“Just in time to help me with the garden,” I said, but we did nothing to the garden. The shared garden was bearded by July, and our neighbor complained. First on the phone, then in person, she asked, “Are you making a meadow?” Her notes hissed under the door. Two, three, four of them, none were answered — how could I? The very way she wrote, her backward-slanting, pinched characters looked more like ants to me than letters, ants marching over creamy paper. You, you, you, you, you.

At night the ditch in the middle of the bed, the numbers illumined on the clock. I felt movement when, back-to-back, I tried to sleep with him. He had bad dreams and woke up moaning and lay as in a coffin, wide awake. My young husband was thinking about his future. He said he was thinking about business school, which took me by surprise. He was thinking about making money — and he did! Or so I am told. The friends who still see him say.

We were young.

At a pub once and under swags of weeds we were meant to kiss by, my young husband said I was a fool.

What could we have been talking about when he said, “You don’t know a thing about me”? He said, “You never did.” But I thought, I thought, I thought was the way a lot of my sentences started then with him, then with her. Youth and appetite! Something else about this part of my life, when I spent most nights with a man I called my young husband — I kicked him for not coming sooner to the rescue with the cigarettes. I called him names at restaurants when I was drunk with visitors. I said, “Who knows?” when anyone asked me what he was doing. I said he was a liar when I was a liar, too. I went out of my way to hurt him, spending too much money — I was mean to my young husband, and I often no more knew why that was than I knew what it had to do with our lives.

And there was more that was significant. Her teeth, her lips, her lip-like part. And more, more you should know, how, about to board the plane for home, my young husband broke the bottle of expensive wine that he had saved so conspicuously. The wine was red, of course, and ran under and around my shoes.